They’re under a class-action lawsuit currently for using biometric data in a US state where it’s illegal. Just kinda interesting. https://www.bipatestsettlement.com/Home/FAQ
I would Honestly just set your user agent to Windows. It is good for privacy and is the default for Librewolf.
“Upgrading” to a supported operating system… “Upgrading”.
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
“Our spyware is not able to accommodate your platform.”
The horror stories I’ve read about what you give the software access to do (assuming there’s truth to them; I’ve never run it myself).
It’s hilarious how bad it is
I won’t ramble but I’m a cybersecurity professional with a lot of certs and… I’ve played with it.
Hey Pearson, I have completely defeated your anticheat measures. Ironically, have used my expertise to pass cybersecurity exams. Fight me.
Hey OP, use a free windows VM. Guess how many monitors your VM has? Guess how many your host can have? Yeah.
This was 2019, so they may have gotten past that but I tells ya… For folks testing cybersec pros, they sure don’t have airtight opsec.
You should get bonus points in cybersecurity for bypassing that crap
They’re in the business of selling the illusion of security to university administrators.
Most money moves because a retarded manager/executive has a retarded idea, I’m sure of it.
Also kickbacks, don’t forget the kickbacks
This is why I just suck it up and go to a testing center even though more often than not it’s unpleasant too. I’m not installing all their tools and having to clear an entire room so there’s nothing that can be seen is such a hassle.
used unlicensed windows vm back in college. user agent change is faster
What “Key features” from an educational course could possibly require windows? It’s spying on you.
Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.
Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.
If they’re going to have online exams they need to just accept that cheating is going to happen. There’s a million ways to do that in an environment you control. Make the exams open book but make it harder to account for the fact that the students have access to reference materials.
Yea but that takes work, and we’d like, have to pay our teachers more.
Not really a lot of the teachers at the tech school I went to did it that way and I know for a fact they weren’t getting paid well at all.
Then you’re lucky they had the freedom to donate their time like that.
They weren’t donating their time. Writing tests was part of their job. They just made the questions a lot harder and more based on practical knowledge. Rather than just recalling information found in the book you had to apply the information to answer the questions.
So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.
Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.
all that stuff is rendered useless by having a second computer.
Nope as you have to show the room before the exam starts andusing the second computer shows up in the webcam. It’s what the webcam if for.
So what they’re going to make you disassemble your personal space if you happen to have a PC on the same desk you use for your school laptop?
Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.
Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.
I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.
I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.
I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.
TPM2.0 DRM crap?
They just don’t want to support it to save dev time/money
Oh yes, the very expensive Dev time cost of zero, because it is a fucking website.
Our website runs on a linux server, can you not use it though
The Pearson website for assignments and exercises is definitely in by bottom-ten user experiences on the internet. And it’s even a paid tool! Fuck pearson
Also, fuck the profs for choosing to use it, and make it a requirement for a course.
Would you share your preferred alternative(s), if any? Thanks! 🖐️
Just a maths workbook I guess. This was just forced on me as a student so I’m not really aware if the alternatives.
Lutris -> chrome -> try again?
They mean downgrade
I ran into this before too, I believe I got around it with a User Agent changer… that or a windows 10 VM with 2 cores and 2GB of RAM that ran only Firefox… or you may be able to just press remind me later and suffer little/no consequences
I think it’s just because people that use Linux are generally more technologically inclined and are more likely to try and get around their crappy DRM
Yeah, I can still access it just fine, but the word “Upgrade” didn’t make me very happy…
Very true, I too would consider Microsoft’s spyware a massive downgrade
Time to download Virtualbox
Is Virtualbox still considered the go-to VM program? I haven’t been keeping up.
Very much no
Use libvirtd/Qemu on Linux and Hyper-V on Windows
I recommend using a kernel virtual machine.
KVM comes with the Linux kernel.
If you want to set it up manually, you’ll have to look into qemu and virtio.
If you want a more virtualbox-like experience, you can use boxes (also called “gnome boxes”), which gives you a very simple UI for setting up VMs (including windows) with networking/shared drives/hardware pass through/etc.
KVM is just the hypervisor, not the whole package.
Why?
So that you can run the windows exclusive software in a virtual machine.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Too many users on here don’t know about the old magics
What do you mean by that?
I was talking about all those downvotes you got by people who got whooshed
… Set up firefox for windows via wine, if its a webapp?
I had a course where the teacher basically said you would have a hard time passing if you did not have a windows laptop because it was the only OS that worked well with their program.
The program was Excel workbooks
College is a joke
Most tech street smart non-techie.
